"Moses has revealed the existence of
God to his nation. Jesus Christ to the Roman world, Muhammad to the old
continent...

"Arabia was idolatrous when, six centuries after
Jesus, Muhammad introduced the worship of the God of Abraham, of Ishmael,
of Moses, and Jesus. The Ariyans and some other sects had disturbed the
tranquility of the east by agitating the question of the nature of the
Father, the son, and the Holy Ghost. Muhammad declared that there was none
but one God who had no father, no son and that the trinity imported the
idea of idolatry...

"I hope the time is not far off when I shall
be able to unite all the wise and educated men of all the countries and
establish a uniform regime based on the principles of Qur'an which alone
are true and which alone can lead men to happiness."

Sir George
Bernard Shaw in 'The Genuine Islam,' Vol. 1, No. 8, 1936.

"If any religion had the chance of ruling
over England, nay Europe within the next hundred years, it could be Islam."

"I have always held the religion of Muhammad in
high estimation because of its wonderful vitality. It is the only religion
which appears to me to possess that assimilating capacity to the changing
phase of existence which can make itself appeal to every age. I have studied
him - the wonderful man and in my opinion far from being an anti-Christ,
he must be called the Savior of Humanity."

"I believe that if a man like him were to assume
the dictatorship of the modern world he would succeed in solving its problems
in a way that would bring it the much needed peace and happiness: I have
prophesied about the faith of Muhammad that it would be acceptable to the
Europe of tomorrow as it is beginning to be acceptable to the Europe of
today."

"Our use of phrase 'The Dark ages' to
cover the period from 699 to 1,000 marks our undue concentration on Western
Europe...

"From India to Spain, the brilliant civilization
of Islam flourished. What was lost to christendom at this time was not
lost to civilization, but quite the contrary...

"To us it seems that West-European civilization
is civilization, but this is a narrow view."

H.G. Wells

"The Islamic teachings have left great
traditions for equitable and gentle dealings and behavior, and inspire
people with nobility and tolerance. These are human teachings of the highest
order and at the same time practicable. These teachings brought into existence
a society in which hard-heartedness and collective oppression and injustice
were the least as compared with all other societies preceding it....Islam
is replete with gentleness, courtesy, and fraternity."

Dr. William
Draper in 'History of Intellectual Development of Europe'

"During the period of the Caliphs the
learned men of the Christians and the Jews were not only held in great
esteem but were appointed to posts of great responsibility, and were promoted
to the high ranking job in the government....He (Caliph Haroon Rasheed)
never considered to which country a learned person belonged nor his faith
and belief, but only his excellence in the field of learning."

"Islam is a religion that is essentially
rationalistic in the widest sense of this term considered etymologically
and historically....the teachings of the Prophet, the Qur'an has invariably
kept its place as the fundamental starting point, and the dogma of unity
of God has always been proclaimed therein with a grandeur a majesty, an
invariable purity and with a note of sure conviction, which it is hard
to find surpassed outside the pale of Islam....A creed so precise, so stripped
of all theological complexities and consequently so accessible to the ordinary
understanding might be expected to possess and does indeed possess a marvelous
power of winning its way into the consciences of men."

"As there is no danger of our becoming,
any of us, Mahometans (i.e. Muslim), I mean to say all the good of him
I justly can...

"When Pococke inquired of Grotius, where the proof
was of that story of the pigeon, trained to pick peas from Mahomet's (Muhammad's)
ear, and pass for an angel dictating to him? Grotius answered that there
was no proof!...

"A greater number of God's creatures believe in
Mahomet's word at this hour than in any other word whatever. Are we to
suppose that it was a miserable piece of spiritual legerdemain, this which
so many creatures of the almighty have lived by and died by?...

"A poor, hard-toiling, ill-provided man; careless
of what vulgar men toil for. Not a bad man, I should say; Something better
in him than hunger of any sort, -- or these wild arab men, fighting and
jostling three-and-twenty years at his hand, in close contact with him
always, would not revered him so! They were wild men bursting ever and
anon into quarrel, into all kinds of fierce sincerity; without right worth
and manhood, no man could have commanded them. They called him prophet
you say? Why he stood there face to face with them; bare, not enshrined
in any mystry; visibly clouting his own cloak, cobbling his own shoes;
fighting, counselling, ordering in the midst of them: they must have seen
what kind of man he was, let him be called what you like! No emperor with
his tiaras was obeyed as this man in a cloak of his own clouting. During
three-and-twenty years of rough actual trial. I find something of a veritable
Hero necessary for that, of itself...

"These Arabs, the man Mahomet, and that one
century, - is it not as if a spark had fallen, one spark, on a world of
what proves explosive powder, blazes heaven-high from Delhi
to Granada! I said, the Great man was always as lightning out of Heaven;
the rest of men waited for him like fuel, and then they too would flame..."

Simon Ockley
in 'History of the Saracens'.

“A rugged, strife-torn and mountaineering
people...were suddenly turned into an indomitable Arab force, which achieved
a series of splendid victories unparalleled in the history of nations,
for in the short space of ninety years that mighty range of Saracenic conquest
embraced a wider extent of territory than Rome had mastered in the course
of eight hundred.”

Phillip Hitti
in 'Short History of the Arabs.'

"During all the first part of the Middle
Ages, no other people made as important a contribution to human progress
as did the Arabs, if we take this term to mean all those whose mother-tongue
was Arabic, and not merely those living in the Arabian peninsula. For centuries,
Arabic was the language of learning, culture and intellectual progress
for the whole of the civilized world with the exception of the Far East.
From the IXth to the XIIth century there were more philosophical, medical,
historical, religiuos, astronomical and geographical works written in Arabic
than in any other human tongue."

Carra de Vaux
in 'The Philosophers of Islam,' Paris, 1921.

"Finally how can one forget that at the
same time the Mogul Empire of India (1526-1857 C.E.) was giving
the world the Taj Mahal (completed in
1648 C.E.) the architectural beauty of which has never been surpassed,
and the ‘Akbar Nameh’ of Abul Fazl: "That extraordinary work full
of life ideas and learning where every aspect of life is examined listed
and classified, and where progress continually dazzles the eye, is a document
of which Oriental civilization may justly be proud. The men whose genius
finds its expression in this book were far in advance of their age in the
practical art of government, and they were perhaps in advance of it in
their speculations about religious philosophy. Those poets those philosophers
knew how to deal with the world or matter. They observe, classify, calculate
and experiment. All the ideas that occur to them are tested against facts.
They express them with eloquence but they also support them with statistics."...the
principles of tolerance, justice and humanity which prevailed during the
long reign of Akbar."

Marcel
Clerget in 'La Turquie, Passe et Present,' Paris, 1938.

"Many proofs of high cultural level of
the Ottoman Empire during the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent
are to be found in the development of science and law; in the flowering
of literary works in Arabic, Persian and Turkish; in the contemporary monuments
in Istanbul, Bursa, and Edirne; in the boom in luxury industries; in the
sumptuous life of the court and high dignitaries, and last but not least
in its religious tolerance. All the various influences - notably
Turkish, Byzantine and Italian mingle together and help to make this the
most brilliant epoch of the Ottomans."

Thomas Arnold
in 'The Call to Islam.'

"We have never heard about any attempt
to compel Non-Muslim parties to adopt Islam or about any organized persecution
aiming at exterminating Christianity. If the Caliphs had chosen one of
these plans, they would have wiped out Christianity as easily as what happened
to Islam during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain; by the same
method which Louis XIV followed to make Protestantism a creed whose followers
were to be sentenced to death; or with the same ease of keeping the Jews
away from Britain for a period of three hundred fifty years."

"This is why the God of vengeance, who
alone is all-powerful, and changes the empire of mortals as He will, giving
it to whomsoever He will, and uplifting the humble beholding the wickedness
of the Romans who throughout their dominions, cruelly plundered our churches
and our monasteries and condemned us without pity, brought from the region
of the south the sons of Ishmael, to deliver us through them from the hands
of the Romans. And if in truth we have suffered some loss, because the
Catholic churches, that had been taken away from us and given to the Chalcedonians,
remained in their possession; for when the cities submitted to the Arabs,
they assigned to each denomination the churches which they found it to
be in possession of (and at that time the great churches of Emessa and
that of Harran had been taken away from us); nevertheless it was no slight
advantage for us to be delivered from the cruelty of the Romans, their
wickedness, their wrath and cruel zeal against us, and to find ourselves
at people. (Michael the Elder, Jacobite Patriarch of Antioch wrote this
text in the latter part of the twelfth century, after five centuries of
Muslim rule in that region. Click here for a
relevant document sent to the monks of St. Catherine Monastery in Mt. Sinai,
628 C.E.)

James Addison
in 'The Christian Approach to the Moslem,' p. 35.

"Despite the growth of antagonism, Moslem
(Muslim) rulers seldom made their Christian subjects suffer for the Crusades.
When the Saracens finally resumed the full control of Palestine the Christians
were given their former status as dhimmis. The Coptic Church, too
had little cause for complaint under Saladin's (Salahuddin) strong government,
and during the time of the earlier Mameluke sultans who succeeded him the
Copts experienced more enlightened justice than they had hitherto
known. The only effect of the Crusaders upon Egyptian Christians was to
keep them for a while from pilgrimage to Jerusalem, for as long as the
Frank were in charge heretics were forbidden access to the shrines. Not
until the Moslem victories could they enjoy their rights as Christians."

Muhammad
Marmaduke Pickthall in his 1927 Lecture on 'Tolerance in Islam,' Madras,
India.

"In the eyes of history, religious toleration
is the highest evidence of culture in a people....It was not until the
Western nations broke away from their religious law that they became more
tolerant, and it was only when the Muslims fell away from their religious
law that they declined in tolerance and other evidences of the highest
culture. Before the coming of Islam it (tolerance) had never been preached
as an essential part of religion...

"If Europe had known as much of Islam, as Muslims
knew of Christendom, in those days, those mad, adventurous, occasionally
chivalrous and heroic, but utterly fanatical outbreak known as the Crusades
could not have taken place, for they were based on a complete misapprehension...

"Innumerable monasteries, with a wealth of treasure
of which the worth has been calculated at not less than a hundred millions
sterling, enjoyed the benefit of the Holy Prophet's
(Muhammad’s) Charter to the monks of Sinai and were religiously
respected by the Muslims. The various sects of Christians were represented
in the Council of the Empire by their patriarchs, on the provincial and
district council by their bishops, in the village council by their priests,
whose word was always taken without question on things which were the sole
concern of their community...

"The tolerance
within the body of Islam was, and is, something without parallel in history;
class and race and color ceasing altogether to be barriers."

Sir John
Bagot Glubb

“Khalif (Caliph) Al-Ma'mun's period of
rule (813 - 833 C.E.) may be considered the 'golden age' of science
and learning. He had always been devoted to books and to learned pursuits.
His brilliant mind was interested in every form of intellectual activity.
Not only poetry but also philosophy, theology, astronomy, medicine and
law all occupied his time.”

“By Mamun's time medical schools were extremely
active in Baghdad. The first free public hospital was opened in
Baghdad during the Caliphate of Haroon-ar-Rashid. As the system developed,
physicians and surgeons were appointed who gave lectures to medical students
and issued diplomas to those who were considered qualified to practice.
The first hospital in Egypt was opened in 872 AD and thereafter public
hospitals sprang up all over the empire from Spain and the Maghrib to Persia.”

On the Holocaust of Baghdad (1258
C.E.) Perpetrated by Hulagu:

“The city was systematically looted, destroyed
and burnt. Eight hundred thousand persons are said to have been killed.
The Khalif Mustasim was sewn up in a sack and trampled to death under the
feet of Mongol horses.

“For five hundred years, Baghdad had been a city
of palaces, mosques, libraries and colleges. Its universities and hospitals
were the most up-to-date in the world. Nothing now remained but heaps of
rubble and a stench of decaying human flesh.”